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Description

Description

Bulgaria is a Slavic nation, Orthodox in faith but with a sizable Muslim mirity. That mirity is divided into various ethnic groups, including the most numerically significant Turks and the so-called Pomaks, Bulgarian-speaking men and women who have converted to Islam. Mary Neuburger explores how Muslim mirities were integral to Bulgaria's struggle to extricate itself from its Ottoman past and develop a national identity, a process complicated by its geographic and historical positioning between evolving and imagined parameters of East and West. The Orient Within examines the Slavic majority's efforts to conceptualize and manage Turkish and Pomak identities and bodies through gendered dress practices, renaming of people and places, and land reclamation projects. Neuburger shows that the relationship between Muslims and the Bulgarian majority has run the gamut from accommodation to forced removal to total assimilation from 1878, when Bulgaria acquired automy from the Ottoman Empire, to 1989, when Bulgaria's Communist dictatorship collapsed. Neuburger subjects the concept of Orientalism to an important critique, showing its relevance and complexity in the Bulgarian context, where national identity and modernity were brokered in the shadow of Western Europe, Russia/USSR, and Turkey.

Author Biography

Mary C. Neuburger is Director of the Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies, Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, and Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the coeditor of the Journal of Contemporary History and author of The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria, also from Cornell.